Named after the late Kathryn T. Preyer, a distinguished
historian of the law of early America known for her generosity to young
legal historians, the program of Kathryn T. Preyer Scholars is designed to
help legal historians at the beginning of their careers. At the annual
meeting of the Society two younger legal historians designated Kathryn T.
Preyer Scholars will present what would normally be their first papers to
the Society.

Here are the formal citations (courtesy of H-Law):

Anne Fleming -- “The Borrower's Tale: A History of Poor Debtors in Lochner Era New York City”

This paper considers the credit industry that catered to the poor
and working class populations of NY at the beginning of the 20th
century. It manages to capture both the borrowers’ social worlds and
the perspective of reformers, who sought to ameliorate loan sharking by
exposing it to healthy competition rather than regulating it out of
existence.

This essay explores the roots of Justice Taney’s reasoning in Dred
Scott, tracing it to an earlier conceptualization of
citizenship/subjecthood as frozen in time and essentialized in racial
terms. The history contributes a disturbing and thought-provoking
episode of originalism as instrumentally deployed.

This paper considers the “consular litigation” brought in U.S.
courts by Spanish and Portuguese consuls against American privateers who
were working for revolutionary South American governments. Those
claims became the most effective way that the consuls could press for a
change in American foreign policy on neutrality; they also shaped
judicial power along the way.

I had the pleasure of attending the panel at which these scholars presented their work. Chair Mary Sarah Bilder (Boston College) made a point of noting something about each paper that would have caught Kitty Preyer's eye. Commentator Chuck McCurdy (University of Virginia) agreed that "Kitty would have loved these papers," and gave four reasons: (1) They ask good questions, (2) they display an admirable "patience" with the archives, (3) they engage deeply with legal actors, thereby providing a social history of law, and (4) they report things that other scholars had not noticed or discovered. The second commentator, Bill Wiecek (Syracuse University), echoed Professor McCurdy's praise. He underlined the depth of the panelists' archival research and the new light they each shed on familiar but important subjects.

The Preyer Memorial Committee, chaired by Christine Desan (Harvard University), selected the winners from a reportedly terrific pool of applicants.

3 comments:

I was there, too, and will add that this was an unexpectedly moving session for me. Of course, it's not surprising that the panel provided an occasion for reflection on intergenerational transitions within an academic subfield, as the goal of its creators was to honor Professor Preyer's career as a teacher as well as a scholar. But that subject was very much on my mind as these three young scholars not only presented their work with poise and polish but also evidenced their own appreciation of the significance of the occasion, in two cases, at least, in the presence of their own teachers. Then McCurdy, after making his four points, concluded by voicing what I had been thinking, better than I could have put it: judging from what we had just heard, the future of American legal history was very bright indeed.